Any discussion of the prior art throughout the specification should in no way be considered as an admission that such prior art is widely known or forms part of common general knowledge in this field.
As digital music continues to increase in popularity, various methods of advertising have been attempted to make use of this new venue to reach out to music listeners. A common way of music advertising is embedding an advertisement inside the audio stream of a song. The listener is then exposed to the advertisement, whenever the music is played. However, this provides for an unpleasant experience for the user because it interferes with the integrity of the music. Moreover, the advertisement becomes obsolete with time.
Another way of advertising is obtaining and displaying an advertisement to the listener's monitor using specialized software to manipulate the advertisement. One such method is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,970,834 issued Nov. 29, 2005. The problem with this approach is that specialized software or a machine needs to be physically in place for the advertising process to take place. The commercial is independent of the song, thus placing requirements on the listener to install and use specialized equipment to receive the advertisement and/or to play the desired song.
An issue with music-centric advertising is tracking the number of times an advertisement has been displayed. To achieve this tracking count, the described invention equates the number of times a song has been played (play counts) to the number of times an advertisement has been displayed.
Play counts are a commonly used technique and have been used in three primary approaches. The first approach is purely for personal accommodation, allowing listeners to distinguish between songs based on personal usage. The second approach is to determine royalties to be paid to record companies for providing songs that were played. This latter approach, though having relevance to this invention, does not constitute an advertising technique, nor is it used in any way to generate or account for ad exposure and/or ad revenue. A third approach outlined in U.S. Pat. No. 6,970,834 discussed above is to determine the total income from played songs knowing that listeners pay for every time they listen to a song.
However, this approach is not advertisement related and is not used to track advertisement exposure, thus it is not relevant to the hereby listed invention.
A common advertising technique on the Internet is CPM (Cost-Per-Thousand-Impressions). The tracking of user exposure is done using impressions. The advertiser pays for every thousand times their banner has been displayed on the user's web browser. Whereas the proposed invention follows a similar paradigm, the advertisement process is not done using browsers or any Internet related matter. Although CPM is an integral part of web site advertising, it is not in any way associated with digital music and advertising on digital music. While it is effective for online advertisement it is hard for the music receiver to relate to offline music advertisement.